


One More Time

by BirulianAngel



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-Typical Worms (The Magnus Archives), M/M, Time Travel Fix-It, canon until episode 160
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-05
Updated: 2020-06-05
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:28:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24551602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BirulianAngel/pseuds/BirulianAngel
Summary: Jon and Martin have been sent back to the past to stop the apocalypse. Unfortunately, neither actually remembers how they got back or if they came together. And worse, neither is aware the other has memories of the future. Together yet apart, they tiptoe through a life they already lived to try to correct their past mistakes and save their loved ones and the world.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 19
Kudos: 132





	One More Time

Jon’s head hurt. He made a disgruntled noise, covering his eyes with an arm.

That was strange. Jon hadn’t had something as mundane as a migraine in…years now, it had to be. Certainly not since his coma and all the events to followed, at least.

The fact he was in a passably comfortable bed was even more strange.

The fact he was in the bed alone pushed his groggy mind from idle curiosity into startled alertness.

He sat up. His eyes scanned the room, looking for Martin, who should have been by his side. But there was no one here. He was just in a bare but comfortable room. A familiar room. The bedroom of his flat. 

The flat he hadn’t been back to since being framed for murder. The flat that shouldn’t be so well lit and comforting when the sky outside was filled with the Beholding’s watchful eye.

Only…Jon didn’t feel the Eye’s ever watchful gaze on him. At least not in the same way he had in the months since he’d inadvertently caused the apocalypse.

“This isn’t right…what is this?” he asked aloud to no one but himself, a habit from years of speaking into constantly recording tapes.

Jon tried to reach out, to Know the answer.

His migraine flared up in protest. His vision swam for a moment. It felt different, since the apocalypse it had become so easy to simply Know. Now, however, the door in his mind that held a raging ocean of knowledge felt…blocked. It was still there. He could feel it, feel the knowledge just outside his grasp. But it was like the door was jammed, stuck and difficult to open.

Difficult, but not impossible. He tried to force it, curiosity always getting the better of judgement. 

A small trickle of knowledge leaked through. Just one piece of information. 

The date. 

22nd April, 2012.

The day he’d started his new position as Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute. The day he’d read his first statement. The day that began the domino effect of terrible choices, manipulation, and bad luck that had led to the world of nightmares Jon knew he had been in the day before.

“This…” Jon had a moment of hope, which he quickly squashed. “This is impossible,” he said, his voice hardening. “I’m not daft. So which one is it? The Spiral? The Lonely? Who is this time, dangling hope in front of me just to snatch it away the moment I reach for it?”

Jon was certain, if he were to go outside he would find that things weren’t quite right. Or maybe he wouldn’t be able to leave his flat at all, as it twisted out into an impossible maze.

No entity or avatar answered his accusations, and he still couldn’t manage to Know what was really going on.

“Alright. Well, can’t stay in here forever either way,” he mused after a long silence. He needed to figure out what was really going on. And find Martin. 

Of course, if this was real…

He hardly dared to think about it. It would be all the more crushing if this were one of the Spiral’s lies if he let himself believe it, for even a moment.

As he got ready Jon caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and almost did a double take. He hadn’t seen himself so young in a long time. Dark skin unblemished by scars. Hair shorter and only mildly greying rather than the shaggy full-blown salt and pepper it had been last time he’d seen his reflection. Eyes still dark from overwork, but without the lines that spoke of years of stress and fear. He didn’t have quite the haunted air he’d had about him since…probably since Prentiss’ attack, if he were being honest.

That felt so long ago now. But if this were real…if he really was in the past, then that hadn’t happened yet.

Still, he didn’t dare to hope.

Jon was able to leave his flat without anything out of the ordinary cropping up. No doors where they shouldn’t be, no endless hallways, not even a tape recorder appearing where it shouldn’t be, clicked on and ready to capture whatever horror was waiting for him. It was just an ordinary walk out of his flat, down the stairs, and into the morning sunlight he hadn’t seen in many months.

There were people—honest to goodness people—going about their daily lives rather than trapped in a living nightmare. People with no idea about entities or avatars or rituals.

Jon was in a stupor for a moment, just standing in the middle of the sidewalk unable to process the utter normalcy of it all. Until some young man on a bike nearly crashed into him and flashed an obscene gesture while shouting to “watch where you’re standing”.

Jon grumbled under his breath at this, but now that his brain was functioning again, he made for the underground station. If this was all a strangely intricate illusion, whatever was at the heart of it would surely be at the Archive. 

And if it was real…

Well if it was real then there were some people at the Archive that Jon needed to see for himself.

Jon had always made a habit of getting to the Archives earlier than his assistants. He was a bit behind today, with the sun already a decent ways above the horizon, but he would still have a good thirty minutes until the rest of the archive staff began to make their way in.

“Assuming, of course, that this is real. And that I won’t just find twisted nightmares meant to utterly break me in there,” Jon reminded himself as he pushed his way through the front door.  
The inside of the Institute was completely unchanged. Everything perfectly as he remembered it being all those years ago.

The Archives were a disaster—just as Gertrude had left them. Before Jon had tried picking up the pieces, unknowingly playing right into Elias—into Jonah’s—plans the entire time.

For the first time he dared to feel a flutter of hope. If this was real…maybe he could fix some of those mistakes. Before it was too late. Before Jonah got his world of nightmares to rule over.

That spark of hope threatened to burst into fully fledged flames when not much later he heard voices in the hall. Heartachingly familiar voices. Ones he’d thought he’d never hear again.

It took a great deal of self-control on Jon’s part not to fling himself out of the doorway at them. But how would he explain that? They certainly wouldn’t believe “I’m from a future where you both died and I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, it was all my fault. I’m so happy to see you. Please be real. Please be real and alive and here.”

So instead he made his way to the door and stuck his head out. Sure enough. There they were. The familiar Cheshire grin of Tim as he said some joke Jon hadn’t quite caught. He looked so much happier than the Tim in Jon’s memories, the Tim from that last year between Prentiss’ attack and the Unknowing. Of course that had also been Jon’s fault, hadn’t it?

The other face he didn’t recognize, but he knew her voice. A voice he’d listened to time and time again, committing it to memory. The only memory of Sasha he could trust to be real. And here she was. She was a tall woman, with an open smiling face, dark skin, and braided black hair. Virtually the opposite in every way of the pale blonde facsimile that was until now the only face Jon could conjure up. He supposed the Not Them probably took great joy in taking forms so wildly different from the people they replaced, mocking their memory further and taunting the few who manage to see through the illusion.

“Tim! Sasha!” Jon couldn’t manage to wholly mask the joy and utter relief in his voice.

“What’s the matter, boss? You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Tim said. He grinned like he’d told a hilarious joke, and looked over his shoulder in mock horror before adding, “Starting to see spooooky things coming into this dusty old place so early?”

Jon couldn’t stop the grimace at ‘spooky’. He’d somehow managed to forget just how much Tim liked to antagonize him—if only in jest at this point in time.

“Not…quite anything of that sort,” Jon managed. What could he possibly tell them? What would they believe? At this point in time none of them had much experience with the supernatural. Tim had what happened to his brother, Sasha had seen some things down in Artifact Storage, and Martin…

Jon’s heart ached. If he was really back in the past somehow. If he was really here for good. Then the Martin here would be the young bright-eyed Martin Blackwood who had never been targeted by an entity. The clumsy soft-spoken Martin who made tea and tried to calm office tensions and who was terrified of being found lacking. The Martin who once so thoroughly frustrated a younger and quite frankly less pleasant Jon to no end. A Martin who Jon hadn’t been close to, who he wouldn’t have become close to for many years and many many tragedies.

Jon snapped himself out of it quickly, before Tim or Sasha could notice. “I was…wondering if you had finished the investigations into the statement I need to start recording. The one that wouldn’t record on the laptop.” He couldn’t possibly explain the truth. Not right now, at least. For now, he should just play along, as if he hadn’t suddenly been thrown years into his own past from a nightmare hellscape of his own making.

“Yeah. Martin was supposed to give it to you. Did he forget?” Sasha asked.

“Course he did, this is Martin we’re talking about,” Tim said snidely.

Jon’s heart sank at this. The Jon from this time would have agreed. Would have been frustrated with Martin’s carelessness. Would have told him off later. Now it just made him sad—no wonder Martin had been such an appealing target for the Lonely. They’d all treated him like a nuisance.

“That’s not fair, he—” Jon broke off as the two gave him an odd look. He coughed, realizing despite his intentions that was out of character for his younger self. He would have to ease tensions off of Martin more subtly. “Where is Martin anyways?” he asked, realizing he still hadn’t seen him.

“Oh you know him. He’ll come scrambling in any moment stammering out some apology or another for being late.”

Not a moment later, Martin Blackwood came scrambling in, stammering out an apology for his tardiness.

***

Martin hadn’t known what to think when he’d woken up in his flat for the first time in months. At first, he’d assumed he was still asleep. Somehow managing to have a single calm dream in the hurricane of nightmares that usually plagued him. But this felt awfully real. He scrambled out of bed and cautiously opened the door of his room, not sure what he would see on the other side. All he saw was his own unassuming flat.

He tried to remember how he got here, why he was here and not with Jon in some hideaway from the terrors that were everywhere in their post-apocalyptic world.

He was drawing a blank. He vaguely remembered they’d hatched some kind of plan. Something, something, hill top road, something, Helen, a door, something…he couldn’t get the thoughts to line up quite right and it felt like half of the memories just weren’t there. It was all a blur. He had no idea how any of it led to him being here, in his seemingly normal room.

Alone.

That thought frightened Martin into action. He began digging about his things for some sign that Jon had been here. Or something to explain why he was here.

To his surprise, he found his phone. He’d lost it running from some terror or another early in the apocalypse. Yet here it was. Much newer looking than he remembered, fewer signs of wear and tear. When Martin clicked the power button to turn it on, the phone nearly tumbled from his hands when he saw the date on the screen.

Was…was that what their plan had been? To somehow send themselves back before everything happened? But then why was Martin here alone? Had something gone wrong? Had Jon’s connection to the Eye kept in bound back in the world of nightmares while Martin was free to escape it? Martin shuddered at the thought.

Even if he was here alone though…this meant he had a chance to stop everything from happening. Tim, Sasha, the Watcher’s Crown…they had a second chance to get things right.

He had a chance to save everybody.

Martin’s stomach sank. He remembered all too well what had happened last time someone had told him he was going to be the hero of the story. That’s not how the world worked. Martin Blackwood was a side character in life, at best. Jon, despite his insistence he was a monster, and the undeniable fact he often made poorly thought through choices, had always managed to fill the role of hero more fully than Martin.

But Jon wasn’t here.

So either this was real, and he had a chance to do what he could to save Jon from Jonah Magnus’ plan to turn him into the harbinger of the apocalypse. And make sure that Tim, and Sasha, and everyone else survived as well. And that they actually would get to have a happy ending this time. Or this was all some sick joke from one of the entities, letting Martin believe he could be the hero and help make things right.

Martin glanced down at his phone again and his heart gave a start as he realized that if this was real, he was about to be very late to work. And if the Jon from this time was there, he was about to be very cross. Martin quickly pulled on clothes, and only briefly stared at his reflection—a younger more bright-eyed face looking back, one that still managed to sleep soundly at night, and who hadn’t seen every horror the world had to offer.

Martin snatched up his work laptop and made his way for the Archives, already thinking through how he’d explain his lateness to Jon.

Not long after Martin Blackwood came scrambling into the Archive. Upon seeing the others he stammered out an apology for his lateness. Then he froze as his brain caught up with his actions.

Tim was laughing, and nudged Sasha as he said, “Actually I’d say you’re right on time,” as if it was some kind of joke which went right over Martin’s head.

Sasha was trying to hide her laugh behind a hand. She was beautiful and real and nothing like Martin remembered.

And Jon…Jon was there and so very young, it made Martin’s heart ache. No scars, not a single mark from a dozen different creatures trying to kill him. His dark eyes were sharp and his mouth was set in a thin frown.

And in that moment Martin was certain. His Jon wasn’t here. The Jon who had been by his side through so many horrors. The Jon who had reached out to Martin. Who had seen him, when no one else did. 

Martin was alone. And that meant, real or not, this was just another nightmare.

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written fanfiction in years, but the Magnus Archives got me wanting to try again. I just want them to be happy. But also angst and doubt every step of the way to that happiness.


End file.
